Alternate surfaces

[chris]

I've got the alternate surfaces feature working in Celestia. I decided to have a little fun with multiview and Selden's MOLA data textures:



Clockwise from top left: gravity profile, mantle thickness, topography, and passive radiometry. Here's the .ssc file for this add-on:

Code: Select all

AltSurface "topography" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "mars-mola-2k.jpg"
}

AltSurface "gravity" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "mars-grav-2k.jpg"
}

AltSurface "passive radiometry" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "radmerge-2k.jpg"
}

AltSurface "mantle thickness" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "mars-moho-2k.jpg"
}


A new Windows prerelease with alternate surfaces plus Christophe's auto-completion and field of view enhancements will be ready in a couple hours.

Update: the prerelease will be ready soon--there's one more Pluto problem to take care of first, however.

--Chris

[ogg]

fantastic!

[jrobert]

Chris, is there anything you can't do?! <half expecting him to say "I just finished my personal spaceship... I'll be back in a few million years -- Earth time."> hehe Great work, Chris!

[HankR]

How does the user specify which surface to view?

- Hank

[chris]

How does the user specify which surface to view?

Two ways right now . . .

The general mechanism for selecting a surface is via the right-click context menu. It's only implemented for Windows right now because of the small amount of platform-specific GUI code.

The other method of selecting an alternate surface is specific to the limit of knowledge surfaces described in the Pluto discussion: pressing + toggles between normal and limit of knowledge surfaces. The limit of knowledge surface isn't special--it's just a standard name, nothing more. This selection method should work automatically on OS X and Linux.

--Chris

[chris]

The alternate surfaces look much better with a bump map:



And here's the modified code:

Code: Select all

AltSurface "topography" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "mars-mola-2k.jpg"
    BumpMap "marsbump.*"
    BumpHeight 2.5
}

AltSurface "gravity" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "mars-grav-2k.jpg"
    BumpMap "marsbump.*"
    BumpHeight 2.5
}

AltSurface "passive radiometry" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "radmerge-2k.jpg"
    BumpMap "marsbump.*"
    BumpHeight 2.5
}

AltSurface "mantle thickness" "Sol/Mars"
{
    Texture "mars-moho-2k.jpg"
    BumpMap "marsbump.*"
    BumpHeight 2.5
}


--Chris

[Christophe]

That looks great. I think what's needed now is a 'feed input to all views' option.

[chris]

That looks great. I think what's needed now is a 'feed input to all views' option.

This would be useful . . . It seems that the way to do it might be to track camera changes for the active view, then apply them to all the other views. I think this would be easier and cleaner than broadcasting input to all views.

--Chris

[PhillipT]

Chris,

would be possible to add a similar feature for storing multiple cloudmaps?

Phillip

[wcomer]

Chris,

I've been lurking for months now, and I wanted to say that this latest pre-release is a tremendous improvement. The AltSurface feature greatly reduces the level of effort for comparing the superb textures from the artist in celestia's dedicated fan base. As an example, I've finally seen all of the Don Edwards terraformed mars sequence. I'm pleased to see that the AltSurface handles not only textures and bumpmaps but the haze and specular features as well. I hope that sometime in the next few releases you will be able to allow for complete specificity of all the Atmosphere commands.

Here is my Terraformed Mars AltSurface .ssc for Don Edwards textures.

Code: Select all

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 1" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM01.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.45
}

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 2" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM02.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   Color   [ 1 0.75 0.7 ]
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.45
   Albedo 0.150
}

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 3" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM03.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   BumpHeight 2.5
   Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
   SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.3
   Albedo            0.30
}

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 4" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM04.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   BumpHeight 2.5
   Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
   SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.3
   Albedo            0.30
}

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 5" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM05.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   BumpHeight 2.5
   Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
   SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.3
   Albedo            0.30
}

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 6" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM06.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   BumpHeight 2.5
   Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
   SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.3
   Albedo            0.30
}

AltSurface "IM Terraformed Mars 7" "Sol/Mars"
{
      Texture "TM07.dds"
   BumpMap "marsbump.*"
   BumpHeight 2.5
   Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
   SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.3
   Albedo            0.30
}

I don't know if Don still has those textures hosted, but for those who have them, altsurface .ssc's seems to look for textures in all the usual places (i.e. the new hierarchical system works fine.)

Also, Albedo, Color and BumpHeight don't seem to have any effect as yet, but I put them in in hopes of the next pre-release

cheers,
Walton Comer

[ElPelado]

chris, can you explain how to use AltTextures? you said that you will explain, but you haven't yet.

[wcomer]

El Pelado,

Best to see from example:

Create a new .ssc titled, "mars_as_earth.ssc", in your extras folder.

copy and paste this code,

Code: Select all

AltSurface "Mars as Earth" "Sol/Mars"
{
   Texture "earth.*"
   NightTexture "earthnight.jpg"
   SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
   SpecularPower 25.0
   HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
   HazeDensity 0.3
}

If you right-click Mars within Celestia, you should now see an alternative surfaces selection. Select "Mars as Earth".

cheers,
Walton Comer

[Darkmiss]

Oh this is great stuff
Now i can use both Don's Imaginary Pluto, and Toofri's Limit of knowlage Pluto, and change at a click of a mouse.

Up till now, I had them in two directorys, then used shift-r to change between them.